A new start in online football management

     Apart from a piece about an ill fated attempt to relive my first manager game experience, and a mention of a successful moment in another, I haven’t written about online football manager games here. Which, given that it’s verged on an obsession at times, is a little surprising. I suppose I didn’t want to admit to the addiction side of things.

     As shown by having played the original Football Manager on the Sinclair ZXSpectrum, I’ve been playing these things for a long time on and off. For the last ten years though, I’ve stuck with online versions where you get to test yourself against real people. Often many of them, and from all over the world. I never felt there was any point going back to offline versions once I’d found a decent online game. I can’t even remember the names of some of the first ones I dabbled with, but the first that really gripped me was Championship Manager Online. Sadly, that closed after a while. Although that was a few years ago, the fact that you had to pay to play seems to have been the problem, and one which has only got worse with more and more manager games using freemium systems of one sort or another. Even the masters of the offline game, The Collyers, couldn’t keep their online game going for more than a few years with a fully paying system.

     Now there isn’t a lot of choice, as virtually all the online football manager games use freemium to some degree. Most will try and keep a level playing field for all managers, but it seems to be beyond their ability to actually keep it that way. A more recent trend is to just go with it and allow the buying of success, mostly seen in facebook based games.

     Personally, for a small monthly fee, which you almost have to pay to get the best out of a lot of freemium games anyway, I’m perfectly happy with a pay to play game, as long as it’s good. Finding a good one can be a problem though. There are so many around and you can’t really see what they’re like without getting involved for a while. Then if it’s not really what you wanted you have a difficult decision on whether to stick with it (you may have liked the community within the game and some elements) in the hope it will be more suited to you in the future, or move on, having invested time, and knowing you’ll have to make the initial higher intensity effort again while learning a whole new game from scratch.

     Anyway, having played at managerzone.com and footballidentity most recently, I felt I needed to move on from managerzone. They’ve recently added U23, U21 and U18 leagues there, which suited me perfectly, as youth development had always been my strong point within that game. Unfortunately, to play in those leagues you had to pay extra for it. Given that there was already a ‘club member’ system to be paid for, an additional cast for these leagues was too much for me in a game that I’d been less interested in recently anyway. A perfect storm of both club member and Uxx league season tickets needing to be renewed, and almost having run out of the in game tokens has helped make the decision to mothball my team and move on.
     The decision to find a new game was also driven by a desire to start a game at the same time as other managers I’ve met in different games (mostly footballidentity). We’ve been playing Top Eleven, but didn’t all start together, and as we are based in different countries, have different amounts of sponsor videos to watch, which supplies you with one of the two in game currencies. Yes, it is sadly one of those ‘pay to win’ games. Not ideal then.

     If only there was place that you could go to where you could get advice on which manager game would suit you and the elements of play that you’re most interested in. Well, there almost is. I started a forum for fans of online football manager games, but have never really developed it as much as I’d have liked. Too busy playing the games instead…
     So with a bunch of us split between those still playing footballidentity, and those who had left (you actually play the matches with users as each footballer, so the time needed us more than most games), and the idea that we could find another game and all start at the same time, I went off and found as many options as possible and made a big list. There was an element of deja vu about my search, having done a similar thing whenever a game I’d been playing closed, or I just felt like a change. Three years seems to be the default period between big searches, and strangely, it seems that the bulk of what I find seems to be largely the same selection of games.
     This time though, I found one that is very new. Still in beta in fact. And in the proper sense of the term, not like the footballidentity version of ‘beta’ which it’s been in since I started playing in season 4, over three real life years ago. The game is called Football Strategy and a stated aim is to avoid ‘pay to win’ entirely. It’s early days, and hard to tell how good it will be, but it’s nice to get a group of friends into a game together at a very early stage. Hopefully the developers will stick with their intention to reset once beta is over too. A nice clean slate and level playing field combo. What more could you want?

     Now that I’ve started writing about football manager games the floodgates may have opened just a crack. There may be many posts about Football Strategy. Or whatever comes next…..